PROFILE / Ayelet Waldman / Everybody has life-changing days. For Ayelet Waldman, it was the day she quit her job as public defender in disgust, opening the path to becoming a writer.

Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Photo: MARK COSTANTINI

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Photo taken on 11/14/03 in Berkeley. Portrait of Author Ayelet(cq) Waldman at home in Berkeley.
SF CHRONICLE PHOTO BY MARK COSTANTINI

waldman22_0057.JPG
Photo taken on 11/14/03 in Berkeley. Portrait of Author Ayelet(cq) Waldman at home in Berkeley.
SF CHRONICLE PHOTO BY MARK COSTANTINI

Photo: MARK COSTANTINI

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Photo: MARK COSTANTINI

PROFILE / Ayelet Waldman / Everybody has life-changing days. For Ayelet Waldman, it was the day she quit her job as public defender in disgust, opening the path to becoming a writer.

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She's a firecracker, popping out of her chair to peer around the circle of third-year law students in a class she teaches on federal drug policy.

"Everyone have a topic?"

All but one raise a hand.

"Except for you! And there you are, alone in your ignorance."

This provokes a laugh from the man-without-a-topic, who soon has one -- an analysis of statements the current Supreme Court has made about drugs. "Is the court's commentary supported? Is the effectiveness of the war on drugs supported?" Remember, the prof coaches, third-year papers are a great opportunity to get published in one of the law reviews.

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For Ayelet Waldman, 39, adjunct professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, drug policy is Topic A.

Writing and publishing take up a chunk of time, too. In just a few days, she'll go on a national book tour to promote her new novel, "Daughter's Keeper, " published this month by Sourcebooks.

"Daughter's Keeper" is Waldman's first novel to break out of the mystery genre; she's the author of the popular Mommy-Track Mysteries, published by Penguin/Putnam.

Now perched in a weathered Adirondack chair in the garden of her Berkeley home, she talks about how the book evolved from her original idea to the finished product.

"I set out to write this searing indictment of the war on drugs, and I wrote a novel about the ambivalence one feels when one is a mother. Go figure."

She has decided not to let this perturb her. "F. Scott Fitzgerald had just one subject. Everyone has just one subject!"

Gesturing toward the writing studio of her husband, Michael Chabon, Pulitzer-winning author of "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," she says, "He has just one subject -- male relationships. The thing that consumes me is this question of what it means to be a mother, and what you owe your child, and how much it costs to give them what they have to have."

The novel, set in Berkeley, features an idealistic young woman, Olivia, who shivers with disdain at her mother's bourgeois life. Her mother, Elaine, raised Olivia alone and worked hard for her financial security; she was perhaps unsuited to motherhood and remains baffled by her daughter.

In a charming local nod, Elaine is the pharmacist and owner of Elmwood Pharmacy. (Of the real-life owner of Elmwood Pharmacy, Victoria Carter, Waldman says, "Poor Vicki! People keep coming in and saying, 'I didn't know you had a daughter' -- and Vicki says, 'It's not me!' ")

Elaine's world comes unhinged when Olivia is accused of a drug-related crime and thrown into the maelstrom and, soon after, learns that she's pregnant. A dashing public defender, Izaya, who has more than a passing interest in Olivia, helps them navigate the draconian new federal sentencing rules, and through it all, Elaine and Olivia are able to remake their relationship.

"I think Elaine got a second chance, and that's what the book is about -- the possibility of redemption."

Waldman was born in 1964 in Israel, a place she has returned to again and again.

Her father was an early Zionist who left Montreal to join Israel's 1948 war of independence. On a return visit to Montreal, he met her mother, a Brooklyn native; they married and moved to Jerusalem. By the time of the Six-Day War in 1967, her mother had had enough of living under fire. Waldman was just 2 1/2. "I have a memory of the war, of my mother, opening a can of hummus, and eating it in the bomb shelter," she says. "I have no idea if it's true, but it's my one memory."

The family moved to New Jersey, but by

10th grade Waldman was back in Israel, living for a year on a kibbutz in the Galilee. After high school, she spent her junior year in Jerusalem and had a plan to move back for life.

"Israel was such a huge thing for my parents, and for me it's been this tussle of trying to deal with my very, very mixed emotions. At this point, I'm ready to call the whole Zionist experiment a failure and bring everybody home."

Shaking off her discouragement, she poses a facetious solution: "Green cards, green cards for all. The Palestinians and Israelis will open air- conditioning companies together in Los Angeles, and we will have an end to war. "

Will she write about Israel? "I'm inching into it with the novel I'm working on now, which is called 'The Bloom Girls.' It's about my father's family, and takes place in the 1920s in Montreal."

That would be the manuscript lying on the kitchen counter next to her laptop, the one her husband has made notes on in red pen -- including, next to one section, "DB" ("do better"). "When I see what he's done to my manuscript . . . ," she says, chuckling ruefully.

When does she expect "The Bloom Girls" to be published? "I expect to have 128 pages soon to give to my agent who will then tell me what she wants to do with it."

A self-described nice Jewish girl from New Jersey becomes a criminal lawyer.

Why?

"My parents were good liberals, and they trained me that you have to give back. And being a criminal defense lawyer was the perfect combination of theatrics -- because I really wanted to be an actress, but I was too short -- and doing good." With law, she says, "I could do both. I could be the center of attention, I could have as much drama as I wanted and still be doing good."

After Harvard Law School, Waldman worked at a big New York firm for a year. That's when she and Michael Chabon were thrown together on a blind date, from which they emerged three weeks later, engaged.

"It was pretty romantic. I proposed to him in my sleep," she says. "In the middle of the night, I said, 'So Michael Chabon, are you going to marry me?' --

and in the morning he told me I said this and I was so embarrassed, I laughed and laughed and asked, 'What did you say?' And he said, 'I said yes.'

"The weird thing is, we called our parents and told them and they took us seriously -- and we're happy." They were married in the Brazil Room in Tilden Park and have just celebrated their 10th anniversary.

They inhabit this rambling, brown-shingled house with their four children --

Sophie, 9, Zeke, 6, Ida-Rose, 2 1/2, and 6-month-old Abraham. But before they got to Berkeley -- where they moved largely because Chabon's mother, a retired attorney, lives in nearby Montclair in Oakland -- there were trials.

Waldman landed a job as a federal public defender, first in Orange County and then in Los Angeles.

"There are a lot of criminals and there's a lot of interesting crime in Orange County, which is really good if you're a criminal lawyer," she says.

"It's the bank robbery capital of the world. Why? I used to always ask my students this. It's because of the freeways. Think about it. You rob a bank in Manhattan. Where you gonna park?"

Then came the case that broke her heart -- and planted the seed for "Daughter's Keeper."

Waldman was defending a young man from Honduras named Felipe, just 20 years old and borderline retarded, who was mixed up in a methamphetamine deal.

"He'd gotten involved with a confidential informant who was a Mariel Cuban who had been found to be psychotic by the American physician who evaluated him when he came over on the boat-lift," says Waldman, breathlessly. Arrested for dealing cocaine in the United States, he parlayed that into a career as a confidential informant.

"This is too much for fiction," she says, "but he was also a Santeria priest. So people would come to him and say, 'My uncle is dying of cancer, can you help us?' And he would say, 'OK, sacrifice this chicken, do this methamphetamine deal and I'll cure your uncle.' And then they'd get arrested, because he was an informer."

Felipe was in over his head, and so naive that when Waldman asked if he'd ever been in trouble with the law, he confessed a shameful speeding ticket.

"I knew I was gonna win this case. I knew I was gonna get an acquittal," she says. "Then, the night before trial, the prosecutor called me and said, 'What would you settle this case for?' It was 8 o'clock at night, and I said, 'I wouldn't take anything but two phone counts.' "

Felipe was looking at up to a 24-year sentence with no parole; there is none in the federal system. A conviction on two counts of using the telephone to engage in illegal drug activity would have meant eight years.

"So I said, 'Did I say two phone counts? I meant one.' And he said, 'You take two phone counts tonight, we'll call the judge in, and if you don't go to trial, you can have it.' You never get a deal like that in federal court, ever, " she says. "They were afraid I was going to win, and more importantly, the government official I had subpoenaed did not want to testify."

She went to Felipe. "He was gonna do whatever I told him to do, because that was our relationship. He was afraid, and he was not very smart, and he wanted to make me happy. And I made him take that deal, I made him take the eight-year deal. And when the judge asked me -- 'Have you represented your client to the best of your ability and do you believe this is the right sentence?' -- I started to cry and I cried and cried and cried. And then they took him away, and I just thought, 'I can't do this anymore.' "

She quit.

"There were a lot of reasons I left," she says. "I thought I was spending so much emotional energy on my clients I didn't have any left for Sophie. I was being a crappy mother. Initially I just said I was taking a leave, but I never went back. It was actually sort of heartbreaking, because this was the job I'd always wanted."

Planning to teach, she was working on a legal brief when her frustrations found expression.

On a trip to New York with her husband, who was doing research for a novel, she was ensconced at the New York Public Library when she turned from her own research to jotting some notes for a legal thriller, just for fun. After 50 pages, she showed it to Chabon, who urged her to keep going. Her heroine -- Juliet Applebaum, a stay-at-home mom turned investigator -- was a winning one, and that book was the first of what is now the popular Mommy-Track Mysteries series.

"The books are lighthearted," she says, "and they're not so much about the murder as they are about the woman who's stuck at home with her children and slowly going mad."

The books have a big audience, it turns out. The latest installment, "Death Gets a Time-Out," came out in June and made The Chronicle's best-seller list.

"Nowadays, we have this generation of incredibly well-educated professional women who've given up their work for their children. So, here's the pediatric oncologist who's a Girl Scout troop leader -- I know one. And there's the corporate CEO who's the head of the nursery school committee, which has never been as well-run," she says.

"If you give up this career that you've strived for your whole life, then what you've given it up for had damn well better be perfect." To admit that it isn't perfect is terrifying. But the moral of Waldman's story -- her own and those in her books -- is it may be imperfect, but it is worth it. It's damn well worth it.

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